Marketing and Booth Design: The Birth of the Blue Drop Awards

About a month ago Tim Sharp and I were sitting in his office mulling over Volacci’s Drupalcon participation. How was our booth going to be designed and what was our marketing message going to be? How would we get developers excited about Drupal Internet marketing?

Being a bit obsessed with politics and having followed the Presidential primaries religiously, I suggested a voting theme. Instead of voting for GOP candidates, we would vote for awesome Drupal websites that were launched in the last year. Nominations and votes would come from the people. This would be a perfect opportunity for us to meet hundreds of Drupal developers while they vote at the voting booth setup at the Volacci booth and discuss our Partner Program.

A Drupal award show seemed like a very natural thing to do at Drupalcon. Every attendee at Drupalcon is interested in Drupal websites at one level or another. This would be a chance for the Drupal community to promote and celebrate the amazing work that its members are doing everyday. To further incentivize folks to submit their site and try to get out the vote using social media, we would have some badass awards created. Coincidentally, when I spoke with our CEO, Ben Finklea, he had a similar idea a couple years back and already had the BlueDropAwards.org domain registered.

Once we began putting our pen to the paper and figuring out the details, we decided that rather than making this an event about Volacci we would rather have this be a community event. This is our chance to raise the profile of Drupal and the community. Since then, Volacci has donated our booth to the Blue Drop Awards, have buckled down on designing and developing the contest rules and the website, worked to design the awards, and more.

While Volacci may have spearheaded the Blue Drop Awards, it is my hope that we will be able to drum up a dozen or more volunteers from other companies to help organize and make this into a semiannual event (Drupalcon and Drupalcon Europe). Interested in volunteering to help organize the Drupal Awards or sponsor DrupalAwards.com? Send us an e-mail at info@BlueDropAwards.org. Get the scoop on all the deets here http://www.bluedropawards.org.

And thus, the Blue Drop Awards 2012 were born. It’s time for a Drupalbration.